Swann's Way

by Marcel Proust

Published 1 January 1900

The first volume of Marcel Proust’s monumental masterpiece—in the classic Scott Moncrieff–Kilmartin translation—is not only a perfect introduction to a literary landmark, it also stands on its own as one of the most sensitive renderings of childhood in fiction and a brilliant meditation on the recreation of the past through art and memory.

Swann’s Way is the most frequently read part of Proust’s epic novel, Remembrance of Things Past (also known as In Search of Lost Time). It introduces subjects that resonate throughout the entire work, including the narrator’s love for Swann’s daughter Gilberte, Swann’s jealous passion for Odette, and the rise of the nouveaux-riches Verdurins. Proust’s narrator vividly recalls his childhood in Paris and Combray, most famously in a fraught evocation of his mother’s good-night kiss and in the iconic scene where the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea brings back a flood of memory.


The Guermantes Way

by Marcel Proust

Published 2 March 1913
The third volume of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century

Mark Treharne's acclaimed new translation of The Guermantes Way will introduce a new generation of American readers to the literary richness of Marcel Proust. The third volume in Penguin Classics' superb new edition of In Search of Lost Time—the first completely new translation of Proust's masterpiece since the 1920s—brings us a more comic and lucid prose than English readers have previously been able to enjoy.

After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century, as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons. Both a salute to and a devastating satire of a time, place, and culture, The Guermantes Way defines the great tradition of novels that follow the initiation of a young man into the ways of the world.

The second volume of In Search of Lost Time, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century

James Grieve's acclaimed new translation of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower will introduce a new century of American readers to the literary riches of Marcel Proust. As the second volume in the superb edition of In Search of Lost Time—the first completely new translation of Proust's novel since the 1920s—it brings us a more comic and lucid prose than English readers have previously been able to enjoy. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is Proust's spectacular dissection of male and female adolescence, charged with the narrator's memories of Paris and the Normandy seaside. At the heart of the story lie his relationships with his grandmother and with the Swann family.

As a meditation on different forms of love, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower has no equal. Here, Proust introduces some of his greatest comic inventions, from the magnificently dull Monsieur de Norpois to the enchanting Robert de Saint-Loup. It is memorable as well for the first appearance of the two figures who for better or worse are to dominate the narrator's life—the Baron de Charlus and the mysterious Albertine.